Think of someone you know who has never used the net, not even for email: your mother perhaps. If a government survey released this week is to be believed, the net-disenfranchised constitute 55% of adults - or almost 25 million people on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Now put yourself in the position of the web missionary: the poor idiot who, after dinner and a bottle of wine, agrees to show your never-user around. How do you do it?

Conscious of the power of first impressions, do you decide to show them one thing, which, to the eyes of a newcomer, will immediately release the potential, spirit and charm of the web? If so, what will it be? Email? A powerful search engine? A portal? A news service? None of the above?

I believe there is one unmarketed, relatively unknown type of site that, executed right, will help to introduce the newcomer to the internet and keep them coming back. It is called a weblog.

A weblog is, literally, a log of the web - a sort of frequently updated portal, where new entries go to the top and old ones drift to the bottom. It usually consists of the take of one editor - the weblogger or "blogger" - on the gems he or she has found online, either generally or on a theme. It sounds simple, and it is. Find one who shares your taste, and you have a surfing companion for life.

The benefits to the new user are many. As with a conventional gateway site, you are soon offered links to other sites that cover your field of interest. But a good weblog will contain extra qualities: topicality, an individual voice, and a simple, often Spartan, design. These combine to create user-friendliness away from the glare of the big corporations - exactly what the sceptical surfer wants from the net, and doesn't get anywhere else.

If your newcomer is into US media gossip, say, they need not go much further than MediaNews.org, edited by Chicago weblogger Jim Romenesko. It may be produced by a journalism institute, but it began as a labour of love. "A weblog," he says, "is certainly more intimate than a corporate site - and I think the best ones will increase that intimacy."

If your newcomer wanted something more general, they would find that close bond in any number of personal sites. http://www.obscurestore.com. The Haddock Directory is a weblog-cum-portal by Phil Gyford, an ex-Londoner now attending a course in "studies of the future" in Texas.

Kitschbitch, by Katy Lindemann, a gap year student who did a stint at the Guardian, is more diary-based. And in Rebecca's Pocket, half news weblog, half liberal treatise on the world, San Francisco-based web developer Rebecca Blood chats to you as if you were in the next room. The tease "what's in Rebecca's pocket?" says it all.

So why are weblogs so little known? Although they have been around since the very beginning of the net, the term was coined only in December 1997 (by Jorn Barger, editor of the Robot Wisdom weblog), and there are still only tens of thousands across the world - nothing compared to the billion or so web pages in existence. Furthermore, most blogs are run by twentysomething Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers - a bias that is still reflected in the content of most sites.

Only in the past year has software been developed which allows people to get blogging with the minimum of know-how: Blogger, the most celebrated of these, has just celebrated its first birthday and its 40,000th user. But although Pyra, the company that created it, is rightly praised for increasing the number of webloggers, Blogger has also spawned "link-sluts" - cliquey, second-generation webloggers who link to better blogs in the hope of a link in return. Despite Blogger's impressive figures, the number of quality weblogs hasn't quite reached critical mass.

Webloggers can also be fiercely protective of their independence. Like the editors of zines before them, they exist in a world beyond the gaze of the marketing exec and the venture capitalist. "Few webloggers are doing weblogs to attract millions of viewers," says Gyford, who edits Haddock. "They don't have any marketing budget to help them do that, so they won't."

Romenesko concurs, although his audience has grown quickly from just hundreds of visits a month to a quarter of a million, by little more than links and word of mouth. "It's like fanzines - it's always going to be a semi-underground culture, and they have a limited interest," he says. "Look at how much money is spent on marketing for these major sites." He does, though, sound a note of vindication: "Fox News: their website, which has probably dozens of employees, they market on the Fox News channel. They don't have many more visitors than I have at my Medianews.org weblog, which has never spent a cent in promotion."

Like Romenesko, most webloggers are sceptical of the way corporations exploit technology - and rightly proud of the way weblogs buck the trend.

"As we are increasingly bombarded with information from our computers, handhelds, in-store kiosks, and now our clothes," says Blood, in an apologia she has posted on Rebecca's Pocket, "the need for reliable filters will become more pressing. We urgently need to cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract our self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human."

Such filters are especially important to the newcomer; but the irony remains that it takes a corporation to reach newcomers on any scale. So, anathema as it is to many in the blogging community, why aren't more corporations doing weblogs of their own?

A few newspapers have tried it out. The San Jose Mercury News runs a weblog, with high-profile IT columnist Dan Gillmor at the helm. The same newspaper produced one to catalogue the Y2K "crisis" in the days and hours after midnight 2000 - pity the journalist who had to cancel leave for that. Other papers with weblogs include The Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Melbourne Age and, of course, the Guardian. Our blog of global journalism has been around since April.

Also there is increased potential for niche media, such as the trade press, to create weblogs to suit their market. "I can easily see a corporation producing a topic-oriented weblog," says Blood. "In fact, I think it would be a very good way to position oneself as an expert in an area. I'm surprised more companies aren't doing this."

But the value doesn't stop there. Internet service providers (ISPs) such as Virgin Net and Freeserve - home surfers' first view of the net - have long been putting original content on their websites, hoping customers will see them not only as a connection but as a gateway to the web.

Many customers proceed to change their home page to a search engine or media brand they trust. But how much more trusting would newcomers become if these pages truly fulfilled the gateway function, and provided regularly updated links and commentary from the new surfer's point of view?

The trouble, as Gyford points out, is the fear of losing 'stickiness'. "Big corporations will want to attract millions of viewers," he says, "so they'll produce very different products. People who make such decisions would have seen it as sending viewers off to other sites which is still, to them, a very bad idea."

Of course, it doesn't take much nous to realise that links are what the web is all about; nor that 'stickiness' is achieved by offering users a service they trust.

If you believe statistics published by Which? Online this summer, seven million Britons don't believe the net product is for them; and another half the population, who have used it at work, can't justify having it at home.

Maybe it's time the ISPs, whose job it is to get people online, adopted more of the spirit of the net and said hello to the corporate weblog.